On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 12:37 -0700, Ian Burrell wrote:
On 6/7/06, seth vidal <skvidal(a)linux.duke.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 21:00 -0400, Sean wrote:
> >
> > Sure, but the question remains.. why isn't it delivered to the user in a
working order?
> > That is, why did you need to make that change yourself? Why is it that yum
needs all
> > these little user interventions so often? Why are the error messages it
produces so
> > hideous? Is yum honestly solid enough to make it the foundation of the
installer?
> > If nobody else is thinking the same thing i'll just shut up and deal with
it; perhaps
> > i'm the only one fed up with yum.
> >
>
> The problem you're poorly diagnosing isn't really in yum. The crux of
> the problem is out of sync mirrors being in the mirror list. That's a
> problem we're working on now by taking some work that another project
> has done to check the status of a mirror to make sure that the metadata
> it has matches the metadata that the mirror master has.
>
> To give you a useful analogy to the situation you're experiencing: This
> is like complaining that firefox is a bad browser b/c all of the
> websites you're visiting are down. OR complaining that you are riding a
> bad bike b/c all the roads are closed.
>
There is a bug in yum in that it is not handling the 404 error and
tries to parse the HTML error page. Yum should notice the not found
error and go to the next mirror without spewing parse errors. Or
maybe it should have special logic to detect HTML files and abort the
parse early.
It does that fine, provided the 404 IS a 404 and not just a webpage
SAYING 404.
In the case of
download.fedora.redhat.com for quite some time the server
issued a 200 (OK) and returned a page that SAID 404 in the text.
-sv